Predicting atmospheric background number concentration of ice nucleating particles in the Arctic

• Main Authors: Li, Guangyu, Wieder, Jörg, Pasquier, Julie T., Henneberger, Jan, Kanji, Zamin A.
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Published: 2022
• Subjects: Arctic; Ny-Ålesund; Svalbard; Ny Ålesund
• Online Access: https://doi.org/10.5194/acp-2022-21; https://acp.copernicus.org/preprints/acp-2022-21/

Mixed-phase clouds (MPCs) can have a net warming or cooling radiative effect on climate influenced by the phase and concentration of cloud particles. They have received considerable attention due to high spatial coverage and occurrence frequency in the Arctic. To initiate ice formation in MPCs at temperatures above −38 °C, ice nucleating particles (INPs) are required, which therefore have important implications on the radiative properties of MPCs by altering the ice to liquid ratio of hydrometeors. As a result, constraining ambient INP concentrations could promote accurate representation of cloud microphysical processes and reduce the uncertainties in estimating the cloud-phase-related climate feedback in climate models. Currently, INP parameterizations are lacking for remote Arctic environments. Here we present INP number concentrations and their variability measured in Ny-Ålesund (Svalbard) at temperatures between 0 and −30 °C. No distinguishable seasonal difference was observed from 12 weeks of field measurements in autumn 2019 and spring 2020. In addition, correlating INP concentrations to aerosol physical properties was not feasible. Therefore, we propose a lognormal-distribution-based parameterization to predict Arctic INP concentration solely as a function of temperature. In practice, the parameterized variables allow for a) the prediction of the most likely INP concentrations and; b) the retrieval of the governing distribution of INP concentrations at given temperatures in the Arctic.